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Thanks for such a detailed reply.

It does sound like:

* People actually get out and vote

* They know about the candidates

In my personal view several major western democracies have now reached the point where many would vote for an incompetent from the party they feel loyalty to, over someone competent from another party. I'm not a fan of rigid party loyalty as you may have gathered!

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This sounds a LOT healthier than the UK. Do you happen to know typical turnout?

In the UK it's typically really low:

https://lginform.local.gov.uk/reports/lgastandard?mod-metric=3361&mod-area=E92000001&mod-group=AllLaInRegion_WestMidlands&mod-type=namedComparisonGrou

(25.9% shown on that link!)

And most who vote tend to do so on the basis of the national parties.

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Hi Nick, I don't actually know what typical turnout is but I'm sure it's higher than those UK numbers :/ I also think that turnout numbers have gotten skewed by things becoming more political in past years so we'll see how that holds. I didn't fit it in the article but those polls showed an unusually low number of undecideds and people who didn't plan to vote. So it seems like we're on track for decent turnout.

As to how "healthy" things are I'm not really sure about that. Mayors changing parties all the time isn't really a good thing (not necessarily bad either... depends on the individual cases). I think the Chisinau mayor polls kinda tell the story though. People vote more for a person they trust in a election for mayor and for the party they prefer on a party-list style election (such as municipal council). So it depends a bit on how you ask the question :)

One other thing to note is that successive Moldovan governments have promised and then punted on administrative reform. 32 districts in such a small country is quite a lot. There are a whole lot of very small towns too electing mayors. In this context people do have a lot of familiarity with candidates in many cases. So there's a kinda "small town" effect as well. I don't wanna make it sound too glamorous, party bosses in regions can still wield a lot of power (often ethically questionable administrative power) even when their national party (*cough* the Communists) is pretty much dead.

All in all it's interesting and should be quite the election to watch!

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